Baban is frantically trying to wash this horrific, unbearable, room-filling stench off his hands with cheap dish soap while yelling at a blender that refuses to cooperate because he's terrified that the angry landlord and the neighborhood aunties are going to storm the apartment and throw them all out onto the streets of Delhi just because they want to cook a traditional pork dish for a wedding party.



Look, let's back up a second because this isn't your average fluffy romance flick from the usual lineup of big-budget bollywood movies where everyone dances in the snow, because Axone starring Sayani Gupta, Lin Laishram, and Jimpa Bhutia is actually this intensely claustrophobic, messy indie drama about a group of friends from Northeast India living in the capital just trying to cook a special fermented pork delicacy called axone for their friend Minam's wedding, but the catch is that the ingredient smells so aggressively pungent that literally everyone who isn't from the region completely loses their minds thinking it's rotting garbage.



Upina and Chanbi are running around like headless chickens trying to find a safe kitchen to use because their current landlord has a zero-tolerance policy for smelly food, and honestly, the sheer amount of passive-aggressive staring from the local neighbors in this specific Delhi colony is exhausting to watch.



And then boom, bendong arrives with his terrible haircut and his quiet, stressed-out energy, and they all have to navigate casual racism, landlords who treat them like total outsiders in their own country, and random street fights that break out over parked cars and loud music, which honestly feels so distractingly random right in the middle of a movie about pork that you almost forget what they're fighting for until someone yells about the recipe again.



They end up hiding out in this half-constructed terrace or some random apartment space lent by a sketchy guy named Shiv, and they're chopping onions, and arguing about relationships, and gossiping, and crying about past heartbreaks, and honestly, why does nobody ever talk about how much stress goes into making a simple wedding dish in hindi movies because this feels way more stressful than any cinematic bomb defusal.



Right around the traditional Bollywood interval point, which doesn't really exist structurally since this is an indie flick that completely ignores the standard song-and-dance formula, everyone is just sitting around sweating through their clothes while the pork is marinating and the tension in the room is thicker than the actual smoke coming from the small camping stove they managed to smuggle upstairs.



Chanbi and Baban keep bickering about their complicated relationship history, and I swear I spent ten whole minutes just staring at this one weirdly shaped plastic blue mug sitting on the kitchen counter in the background because the prop department must've found the most aggressively ordinary mug in all of Delhi just to ground the scene, and then suddenly a major argument erupts about whether they should just give up and order takeout because the neighbors are already banging on the door threatening to call the police.



Stuff happens so fast because bendong loses his cool, the pork gets knocked over, and the whole kitchen smells like a biochemical weapon.



They manage to clean up the mess before the cops actually show up, and the neighbors eventually disperse after a lot of yelling, and they finally sit down on the floor together to eat the cooked pork with rice while laughing about how absurd the entire day was.



Baban takes a huge bite of the pork, smiles at Chanbi across the crowded room, and the screen cuts to black right as they take another bite.